Monitor Shopify dispatch SLA breaches with Google Sheets, Slack and Gmail

Quick overview

This workflow is built to monitor your Shopify store every hour and automatically detect open, unfulfilled orders that have gone past your dispatch SLA window. The moment a breach is detected, alerts go out to Slack and Email instantly, helping your team respond faster, reduce fulfillment delays.

How it works

1. Hourly Monitoring — The workflow wakes up automatically every hour using the n8n Schedule Trigger.
2. Fetch Shopify Orders — Pulls up to 250 open, unfulfilled Shopify orders that are older than your configured SLA window.
3. Smart Deduplication — Loads your Google Sheet breach log and skips any orders that were already reported in a previous run.
4. Order Processing — Calculates how old each order is, flags VIP orders, and builds your Slack message and email.
5. Generate Email HTML — A dedicated node builds the full HTML email body from the processed order data.
6. Instant Notifications — Sends real-time Slack alerts and HTML email notifications for newly breached orders only.
7. Error Alerts — If any workflow step fails, the global Error Trigger immediately sends the failed node name and error message to Slack.

Setup

1. Connect Shopify OAuth2 credentials so the workflow can read open orders from your store.
2. Connect Google Sheets OAuth2 credentials and create a sheet with headers runTimestamp, unfulfilledOrderIds, vipOrderIds, totalOrders, and alertStatus, then paste its URL into googleSheetUrl in the SLA config.
3. Connect Slack credentials and set slackEscalationChannel to the target channel ID for both breach and error alerts.
4. Connect Gmail OAuth2 credentials and set recipientMail (and optionally adjust slaHours and vipThreshold) in the SLA config before activating the workflow.

Requirements

• n8n Version: 2.20 or higher
• Shopify Store: An active Shopify store with API access
• Accounts Needed: Shopify, Google Sheets, Gmail, Slack (all OAuth2)
• Google Sheet: Set up in advance with the 5 required column headers (see Step 2 above)

Customization

• Check More Often: Change the Schedule Trigger to every 30 minutes for high-volume stores.
• Paid Orders Only: In the Process & Deduplicate node, add && order.financial_status === 'paid' to the SLA check so only paid orders are flagged.
• Send to More People: Duplicate the Gmail node and connect both copies to Log Breach to Sheets, or use a distribution email address.
• Add SMS for Critical Delays: Connect a Twilio node to send a text message for orders breaching 120+ hours.